Review: RUNAWAY at Bread and Roses Theatre, London

Monday, 25th September, 2023 at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London.

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Reviewer: Emma Dorfman

Rating: 3 Stars

Note: some spoilers ahead.

Zuzana Spacirova has created a whirlwind of a one-woman show in which we find Diana- a 20-something Lonely Londoner with a penchant for making friends out of inanimate, technological objects- and struggling to find ‘home’… well, anywhere. She doesn’t feel at home in London, but she also ran away from her Eastern European (it’s never explicitly mentioned) hometown for a reason: she doesn’t feel at peace there either.

‘I was running away from myself’: and so begins a now-classic, relatable story of a strange person in a strange land. And I can’t overstate enough how relatable the story truly is. After all, how many Londoners are actually from London anyway? I found myself chuckling at the familiar bits of Zuzana’s story, as she recounts her difficulties in making friends (Beatrice, the Tesco self-scan checkout voice, is probably her closest), maintaining healthy romantic relationships and trying to make it as an aspiring West End actress. 

There is a lot going on here, as there should be for any 20-something. ‘Time used to go really slow’, Zuzana’s character, Diana, laments at the beginning of the piece. And much like Diana’s life, Spacirova’s performance moves at record speed. Swift and vivacious, she moves swiftly from one beat to the next, from one story to the next, from one chapter to the next. But I can’t help but wish that the beats were just a tad bit sharper and more dynamic. At times, Spacirova’s transitions can be quite jarring – moving, for instance, from introducing us to Beatrice before swiftly turning the clock back to her childhood and her parents’ complicated relationship. At certain moments, in fact, I nearly sensed the actress was anxious about time. I even found myself wondering, right in the middle of performance, well, maybe the venue needs her out of here by 10 sharp? You know how fringe theatre can be… Either way, the piece can benefit from a bit more space in between those more unwieldy transitions.

It’s worth mentioning, as well, that the themes emerging in the work might desperately need that space. Diana talks about London trains at the very beginning. When did waiting seven minutes for a train become such an ordeal? After all, Diana used to wait for hours at the bus stop in her home country, and it was no problem at all. Spacirova begins with this motif of travel, time, rushing, etc. However, it’s quickly dropped and not picked back up until the very end. Her train to Brixton finally arrives, but she decides that she doesn’t want to go to Brixton after all. Everybody is rushing here all the time, but they all seem to know where they are going. And Diana does not.

This seems pretty evident in hindsight: she shacks up quickly with a roommate she not only cares little for, but actively despises. She leaves a perfectly healthy, functioning relationship out of the blue, which she comes to regret later. She goes in and out of dance class to ‘brush up’ on her skills, but she can never quite make her mind up as to whether or not it’s worth it to wait tables alongside endless cattle calls. She is perpetually stuck in the middle. It would have been wonderful to see this within the vocabulary of performance as well.

RUNAWAY is at the Bread and Roses Theatre, London until September 28th 2023 – more information and tickets can be found here.